U-Boat FuMO 29 radar useless?

[IonicRipper]

I finally started playing the u-boat missions campaign. I left the FuMO 29 radar on my sub to see how it performs and so far i had absolutely no contacts with it. I asked my radar man for single sweeps, continuous sweeps, even tried it myself when i knew there were ships ahead and never got any luck. I know it only scans about 20 degrees in front of my boat but even when i got a contact with the hydrophones dead ahead at about 10 kms, there would be nothing when i surfaced.

Am i doing something wrong or were these things really that useless?

[magic452]

You may have better luck posting this in the UBM thread here.
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/forumdisplay.php?f=232

I'm a fleetboat man myself so I don't have any answer for you.
Maybe someone else will come along here.

Magic

[IonicRipper]

Yeah i know but that part of the forum seems dead. Barely got 1 answer on my last thread and no answer to my follow up question :(

[Claves_Mortis]

I am not an expert about Silent Hunter and am pretty new to it, but following experience I got to share:

First Radar:
With the named Radar neither me nore my radar-guy did "see" anything, although I am regulary using it (being used by my crew and actively by myself). I had no contact with this radar in the un-modded version of SH IV 1.5 and no contact in SH IV 1.5 with Trigger Maru.

Second Radar:
(only used before Trigger Maru yet, on not-modded version of SH IV 1.5)
At the distances stated in the radar-discription (up to 10 km I think) I pretty reliably got the contacts shown up on the radar.
I did use the radar contact information for surfaced torpedo shots, taking the range to the contact which the radar gave me, but NOT the bearing the radar did show. The bearing has always been a bit different (up to 5-10°) from what my periscope or UZO did give me.
Regardless, marking the target ship on my nav-map with the radar-distance and the periscope bearing I got very good and precise calculations and hits.

Note: the radar does not nessessarily (how to write that D_D ) show the contact after just passing its bearing on the radar-search-thingy like the sonar does. The sonar will let you hear the contact on [whatever bearing], even if you just pull the pointer / sonar over the position quickly. The radar sometimes takes 1-3 seconds until the contact is shown in the green signal-line and it also disappears for 1-3 seconds from the radar periodically. That might be caused by heavy sea or something I do not know, but being prepared for that and searching carefully around the bearing at which you did spot / hear the target has been working great with the second radar for me, giving pretty precise ranges, especially at distances where ranges given by periscope are not very reliable.

// I do not know the technical terms and nautic terms of most things here, so please excuse the not very professional describing

[IonicRipper]

Thanks, that is actually very reassuring. I was afraid it might be a bug with my game.